UPDATE: This article was originally posted on November 13, 2018. It has been updated with new information and tips below.
Faced with applying for top-tier MBA programs, you might find yourself struggling to compose one of the key elements of your application: your essay.
Your CV may feature an astounding GPA, an excellent professional record at a top company, or even just your extensive proficiency in languages. However, what it can’t show the board are your underlying motivations, mindsets, and attitudes behind the list of your past endeavors. Thus, your essay is your chance to really stand out.
MBA admissions essays are more than just another requirement to complete. They are your chance to tell the admissions board what they otherwise would never know about you: your passion for creating social impact, advocating for diversity, or simply how your professional ideals stem from your personal life.
It may be hard to tell what makes a truly good essay or to formulate your thoughts in the first place – not to mention making sure what you say is authentic and really reflects you. How do you choose what to write about? How do you formulate those passions into a compelling text? What makes an essay “authentic” in the first place?
The key to this is storytelling.
However, telling a good story can be more complex than it may seem – just because you’ve put the words on paper doesn’t mean they will persuade the admissions board that you are awesome.
To help you with this, it is good to throw in a bit of psychology. By keeping a few things in mind, you can easily make your story – and your essay – stand out when it matters most.
But what is storytelling, exactly?
Storytelling is not just for fairy tales but is also a highly effective method to express what you want to say to the admissions board.
Each story you tell needs to be a personal, authentic example from your past. Stories should be used in your essay as examples to highlight your underlying topic, also called your theme.
For example, to answer Stanford’s “What matters most to you and why” essay question, you may have landed on “sustaining the environment” as your theme. To back this up – in other words, to prove that this is what really matters most to you – you need to choose stories that support this claim.
In this example, you might tell a story about personally experiencing the rainforest during your exchange semester in Brazil, a technology you worked on to help reduce waste in the ocean or promoting sustainable recycling practices at your company. Some essays may only feature a single story; others may tell many. Whichever stories you choose, they need to reinforce your overall theme.
In our experience, making sure your stories support your theme can be one of the trickiest parts of composing your MBA admissions essay. If you need help determining these, feel free to reach out to our experienced team of editors.
What is the purpose of storytelling in MBA essays?
Good stories are tools that can be used to connect with other people – in this case, the staff on the admissions board. In other words, an effective story is effective communication.
Donald Miller from StoryBrand, emphasizes how stories are used to communicate effectively in his great eBook, How to tell a Story. He writes:
“Stories do more than entertain, though. If you want people to understand and identify with a complicated concept, tell a story about it. Telling a story often creates a “clicking experience” in a person’s brain allowing them to suddenly understand what someone else is trying to say. As such, those who can tell good stories will create faster, stronger connections with others.”
Miller explains that a good story will help someone really understand your perspective about an event that happened. Beyond that, it will help the reader connect with the storyteller. This means feeling empathy and inspiration when experiencing the story.
To translate this into the language of your MBA essay, this means that telling effective stories in your essay will help your reader – the admissions board – understand the experiences that made you who you are today: the applicant applying to their school.
In other words, connecting to your reader, in this case, may well mean the opportunity to attend the business school of your dreams.
Stories are universal
Stories are something that every person from every culture can relate to. Hubspot’s article, The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling, explains that:
“We all process emotions and can share feelings of elation, hope, despair, and anger. Sharing in a story gives even the most diverse people a sense of commonality and community… In a world divided by a multitude of things, stories bring people together and create a sense of community. Despite our language, religion, political preferences, or ethnicity, stories connect us through the way we feel and respond to them … Stories make us human.”
By using stories, you can help your reader understand your motivations behind what you care about in a language they are certain to relate to. In fact, Hubspot calls stories a “universal language” for this very reason.
Cultivating this sense of community will implicitly help your reader relate to you. And if they already feel like you share a sense of community, the adcom might intrinsically feel like you belong at their school – the all-important question of “fit.”
Stories simplify messages
Hubspot’s article further points out that stories help readers quickly boil down complex messages. Remember, just because you are applying to a world-renowned school like Harvard doesn’t mean your essay should be overly-philosophical, feature long and complex sentence structures, or be otherwise decipherable only by high-browed academics. Stories will help keep your message straightforward in a way that everyone can understand.
Take HubSpot’s advice:
“We’ve all experienced confusion when trying to understand a new idea. Stories provide a way around that. Think about times when stories have helped you better understand a concept … perhaps a teacher used a real-life example to explain a math problem, a preacher illustrated a situation during a sermon, or a speaker used a case study to convey complex data.
Stories help solidify abstract concepts and simplify complex messages. Taking a lofty, non-tangible concept and relating it using concrete ideas is one of the biggest strengths of storytelling in business.”
Think about it like this: each story represents an example of your theme or your overall argument. Just like when your math teacher once used a story to help you visualize that tricky math problem, you can use a story to help your reader visualize the underlying point in your MBA admissions essay.
However, stories don’t just help your reader understand your argument better, they also solidify the message. Vanessa Boris, in her article What Makes Storytelling so Effective for Learning? on Harvard Business Publishing’s blog, argues:
“Storytelling also helps with learning because stories are easy to remember. Organizational psychologist Peg Neuhauser found that learning which stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts and figures.”
Stories help the reader retain information easier. Maybe that’s why you still remember the story your teacher told you about that math problem.
This is really key – after all, if you can tell a story that will make the adcom remember you, they are more likely to choose you for their school.
So, what makes a good story?
A good story is compelling and clear. This means it not only follows a predetermined structure but that the structure is both logical and easy to follow.
Here too, we can take some good advice from Miller. In his eBook, he presents a clear, seven-step framework for telling a well-structured story that he sums up like this:
A character has a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action. That action either results in success or failure.
Miller argues that this framework can be used to frame almost any story. Take, for example, my last average Saturday:
Although I woke up excited to attend a friend’s barbeque, I soon realized that too many assignments had landed on my digital desk to attend the party. I spent my morning cursing my computer and annoyed at the sudden workload before my boyfriend came home for lunch and discussed the assignments with me. He helped me realize that through a simple restructuring of tasks, I could put off unnecessary parts until Monday and get the rest of the work done quickly. We were able to attend the barbeque together in the afternoon.
Although nothing super special actually happened, I am able to use Miller’s framework to tell an effective story about my rather uneventful day. If we break down this story, we can see how it aligns with his framework:
- A character (me)…
- Has a problem (too much work to attend the barbeque)…
- Then meets a guide (my boyfriend)…
- Who gives them a plan (restructuring my assignments)…
- And calls them to action (to restructure and finish my tasks)…
- That either results in failure (I can’t attend the barbeque)…
- Or success (I was able to attend the barbeque).
By breaking down even the simplest of stories into a framework like this, it is easy to organize them into a logical story form.
As you can see from the example above, stories have predetermined frameworks. So does your MBA admissions essay.
But what does this mean for your MBA essay?
A good story in an MBA essay can usually be broken down into an even simpler format: STAR. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results.
In other words, a good story in an MBA admissions essay will talk about a situation you were in, a task or challenge that you were presented with, the action you took to overcome that challenge, and the results of what happened. In order to tell a compelling story, you must address all of these parts.
Let’s go back to our Stanford example from above. If you want to tell a story to support your claim that what matters most to you is promoting a sustainable environment, you might choose to talk about changing your company’s recycling practices. Your story, in simplified form, might look like this:
I began working at my new job at Company X after receiving my undergraduate degree. From day one, I ate lunch every day in the cafeteria (situation), but became frustrated as I noticed my colleagues continually failing to recycle their reusable waste materials. I quickly realized that this was due to the lack of an established recycling system within the company (task). I conferred with my supervisor, who gave me permission to set up a system, which included installing recycling containers inside and outside the building and organizing weekly pickups by a local company (action). Since then, Company X has proudly recycled their reusable waste for over two years (results).
The STAR method is an even simpler version of Millar’s seven storytelling steps. Applying the STAR method to the stories in your essay will provide them with a structure that is easy to follow and clearly demonstrates your proactive problem-solving skills.
Of course, there are many other storytelling formats out there. However, STAR is a guaranteed winner for your MBA essay.
Looking for example essays that incorporate exceptional storytelling? Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of successful sample essays, in addition to all types of essays from countless schools, brainstorm guides, resume templates, interview mocks and answer models, and much more. Find out more about your one-stop shop for MBA application success here.
Using psychology in your MBA essays
Using a story framework is not the only trick to a successful essay, however.
By polishing your essay with a few helpful psychological tools, you can emphasize its compelling storytelling aspects even more.
Psychology principle #1: tension
Tension is a great storytelling tool.
Tension means presenting a situation or a problem that your reader feels must be resolved. It is one of the main elements that motivates them to continue reading your essay until the end.
Imagine you are reading a story that begins by explaining that someone won a marathon before jumping back to talk about the courage it took to sign up and train in the first place and the doubts this person had along the way. You might feel it is pointless to hear about the training process when you already know that the person will win anyways. This is because the structure of this story has failed to build up tension, leading to your disengagement with the story from the beginning.
Let’s take another similar example. In this story, someone was eager to sign up for a marathon and trained pretty hard before competing. The race went smoothly, the work paid off, and someone won the marathon. This story is neither compelling nor interesting because it lacks tension or a concrete problem that must be solved. Rather, everything seems just pretty easy.
Taking these two examples into account, it can be stated that tension is created through timing and conflict.
Applying tension to your essay: Chekhov’s Gun
A great way to practice applying tension in your essay is by utilizing a principle called Chekhov’s Gun. If you are unfamiliar with this term, Novel Now offers a detailed explanation of the principle and how to use it in fictional writing, but the principle can be applied to your MBA essay as well.
The idea behind Chekhov’s Gun is that everything you say must have a purpose. The principle gets its name from Anton Chekhov’s famous writing advice:
If, in the first act, you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one, it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.
By this, Chekhov points out that there is no point in describing putting a pistol on the wall simply to say that there is a pistol on the wall. By pointing out the pistol in the first place, you are implicitly indicating to the reader that the pistol will have significance to the story. Therefore, if later you do not bring the pistol back into the story, there was no point in telling your reader about it in the first place.
On the one hand, his example highlights the need for relevance. Everything you say must be relevant to the point you are trying to make – your story. If it is not, your reader will not stay engaged while reading your essay.
On the other hand, signaling to the reader that the gun is significant (by mentioning it in the first place) builds up tension. Because you focused your reader’s attention on the pistol, they might be wondering if something (bad) will happen with it in the story. This tension is what motivates them to read until the end.
This effect can be used to create tension in your MBA essay. By adding elements that you pick up later in the story, you add tension that will motivate your reader.
Take, for example, this introduction our client Matheus wrote in an essay that helped him gain admission to Kellogg.
“It had been over four hours since I left Rio de Janeiro, driving towards a remote city on the coastline. All support operations for the largest Brazilian company were based there and was also where I would have go to try and create $2 billion in savings to help revert what many already called a crisis. As I struggled to understand the magnitude of that figure, I remembered I would also be on my own: to reduce the project’s cost to the client, no senior leadership from my firm came along. Anxiety built up as thoughts raced through my mind.”
In Matheus’ essay, tension is created as he travels to his destination. Not only does he anticipate the challenging task ahead of him, he also ponders accomplishing that task without help. His story successfully builds tension that has – I’d bet on it – you wondering if he managed to avert the crisis.
Lucky for Matheus, this story has a happy ending. Despite a few initial mishaps, he was able to come up with a creative plan using bottom-up collaboration that saved the company.
Deciding whether or not the information you are presenting in your essay is relevant and tension-building can be tricky sometimes. Here, too, our editors are good at spotting issues with relevance and are happy to help you identify these.
Psychology principle #2: empathy
Empathy is one of the most powerful tools you can use while constructing your MBA admissions essay. It is what makes your reader connect emotionally with your story – and, in turn, with you. If the admissions board feels emotionally connected to the story you are telling, you are more likely to be accepted into their program.
Infusing your essay with empathy means you are going to need to do some deep emotional digging. An essay that lacks empathy might feature STAR formats like a pro, but without filling those steps with emotion, you will fail to connect with your reader on a deeper level.
This is because integrating emotion into your story is what reveals the motivations, attitudes, and internal philosophies behind the action in your essay – the goal of your essay in the first place. A quality essay displays and shares emotion with your reader to make that emotional connection possible.
Applying empathy to your essay: authenticity
Ensuring that your essay is full of emotion – and can, therefore, instill empathy in your reader – is simple: stay authentic.
Authenticity is key to a good essay. Staying authentic means telling your stories from the heart. On the one hand, this means that they really did happen to you. If you simply make up a story that you think will sound good, the admissions board will likely see right through it. Compelling stories are based on real events or achievements that you care about and are emotionally involved in.
On the other hand, this means you must include your emotional experience of the story, not just the action itself. Instead of just explaining about deciding to work for an NGO, tell your reader about your motivation to make a direct impact on your community.
Take a look at this example from an essay by a Harvard applicant last year:
Here, the sentence lacks emotional authenticity that will resonate with the reader. Take a look at the edited version of the sentence:
Determined to embrace every opportunity during university, I joined Conexão Social, an organization designed to empower leaders to generate positive impact in society.
Not only is this version much more detailed, it infuses the sentence with real motivations underlying the applicant’s actions and feels much more compelling this way.
Peter Gruber offers a lot of excellent advice on inserting authenticity in your writing in this fantastic article in the Harvard Business Review. He mentions that storytelling is particularly suited to leaders; as a leader, can you tell a story that not only emphasizes your own leadership skills but inspires others to action as well.
However, he discusses how adding emotion to your writing can be particularly challenging for leaders, entrepreneurs, and managers because it requires vulnerability to open up and talk about fears, deficits, and insecurities.
Remember: in an MBA essay, exposing your emotions is not a weakness. Rather, it is a primary key to an authentic – and successful – essay.
Psychology principle #3: persuasion
Persuasion is the ability to convince your reader of an action they should take. In this case, it goes without saying that your MBA admissions essay is there to persuade the admissions board to accept you to their school.
More than any other aspect of your application, your essays function as a persuasive tool. They are where you can make complex arguments that are not visible on your CV.
Within the essay itself, your stories are your best persuasive device. They are the way you will convince the board that you should be their number one candidate.
Applying persuasion to essay: storytelling with a point of view
How do you make the stories in your MBA admissions essay persuasive? The best way is by carefully inserting your point of view.
John Baldoni has written a detailed article on this topic in the Harvard Business Review. In his article, he argues that stories are more persuasive if they are not based on rhetoric alone. Instead, he gives key pointers on telling a story with a point of view. These tips include:
Message: you should know what you want to convey to your reader. In the case of your MBA essay, your message is that you want to attend school XY because of the reason YZ.
The right examples: you need examples to support your point. In our case, this means telling stories that are relevant to your overall theme.
Weaving the narrative: this means you need to follow a narrative structure. As discussed above, this may be the STAR method or Miller’s seven steps.
Convey passion: Baldoni explains that conveying passion means showing conviction in what you say. For your MBA essay, this translates to filling your essay with emotions and authenticity.
Support with facts: This one is pretty straightforward; persuasive stories are supported by facts. Instead of just talking about how your project created impact, convince your reader that this is true by stating known (and authentic!) statistics about the number of people the project helped.
Let’s look at an example. Here is an excerpt from another successful essay to Harvard Business School last year. The applicant writes:
Although my parents raised us to be big dreamers, they lacked the resources to pay for private schools, a requirement to succeed in Brazil, as the quality of public schools is very poor. Nonetheless, I was motivated to dream big and enrolled in a preparatory course for the Brazilian SAT during my senior high school year. The statistics were against me. The public school system educated 88% of Brazilian high school students that year but supplied only 2% of freshmen at Brazil’s best engineering university—Poli-USP. With support from friends and family, I was accepted, the sole student coming directly from a common public school in an entering class of 750 students.
Among other tricks, the applicant successfully utilizes relevant statistical information to prove her point – that she is capable of success despite the cards being stacked against her. Here, the addition of statistics contributes to the persuasive nature of her story.
By using persuasion techniques such as these, you reinforce your essay’s core purpose.
One last tip: the human brain likes structure
Donald Miller also has some useful advice regarding structure:
It’s true, the human brain is drawn to clarity and away from clutter.
He insists that a good story must follow one rule: it must always be clear. This is especially true for your MBA admissions essay. In fact, lacking clarity is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when composing your MBA admissions essay.
An unclear story will involve twists and turns, relevance mishaps, and cause your reader confusion. It will make your essay feel as if it is simply listing off random, unconnected events. If the stories in your essay are unclear, this could cause your readers to be unable to understand your point, or more likely – stop reading your essay altogether and move straight on to the next one.
A clear, well-structured story follows a logical timeline, adheres to relevance, and includes resolution. Each part of the story is told in a logical order and is wrapped up with a conclusion. At the same time, nothing in the story is superfluous. If you want to learn more about theme, story, and structure in your essays, be sure to check out our recent article.
It’s time to start typing
You want to make sure you really make the most of your MBA admissions essay. After all, it is your shot to really convince the admissions board that they need you at their school.
Polishing your stories – the real meat of your essay – is how you can really make your essay shine. Relying on a framework, such as STAR, can help make that happen. However, you may find that you have a few more tricks up your sleeve than you may think.
By emphasizing your story with psychological elements such as tension, you can create a narrative that has your readers begging for an outcome. On the other hand, filling your stories with personal, authentic emotion will also increase their feelings of empathy while reading your story. Only when your reader really connects with you – feels what you feel – can your essay truly be persuasive.
Of course, no essay is perfect from the get-go. As every writer knows, polishing to perfection takes many rounds of editing – not to mention patience.
Here at Ellin Lolis Consulting, we are experts at strategic editing for MBA admissions essays. We know how to help you shape your stories to add psychological elements like these that will leave a lasting impression on your reader. Contact us today to get started. We’re here to help!
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
